The financial services industry is a prime target for fraud. Large sums of money are exchanged through a vast number of transactions. Those transactions are executed through multiple steps exhibiting various sets of security risks. One such set of risks is presented by dishonest industry associates.
A financial services associate may have access to numerous customer accounts. A dishonest associate may take advantage of that access to perpetrate fraud.
Grand-scale frauds perpetrated by unscrupulous associates have been the focus of public attention. Less well known to the public, but of ongoing concern and mounting cost to financial services institutional entities, is endemic smaller scale fraud.
Often committed by low-profile associates, such as bank tellers, smaller scale fraud may not be readily detectable. Over time, serial small-scale fraudsters may inflict significant losses upon customers and entities.
The efficient identification of likely perpetrators of fraud of any scale may benefit customers and entities.
The process of identification may begin with a financial services industry entity receiving a claim from a customer that his or her account has been frauded. The fraud claim may be required to conform with various criteria of claim receiving and of claim content. The criteria of receiving may include passing typical security tests of validation of the claim's identification of the customer and account allegedly frauded.
The criteria of content may include confirmation of a transaction having been transacted on a date alleged in the claim and of the transaction having been of an amount in congruence with the claim. With computer-mediated precise time-stamping and automatic recordation of account numbers and of transaction types and amounts now routinely carried out in financial service entities such as banks, such criteria of content may provide for the claimed fraudulent transaction to be directly unambiguously traced back to the perpetrating entity associate or associates.
In other cases, the scope, trustworthiness and/or precision of the criteria of content may be wanting. The dates of fraudulent transactions may be unknown, as when fraud may have been serially perpetrated over time prior to the customer taking notice of its cumulative effect. In such cases, fraudulent amounts per transaction may not be well delineated and/or may not be clearly discerned by the customer. In these and other cases of insufficiency of criteria of content, a host of means—ranging from methods of yesteryear to sophisticated novella of the digital cyber-age—may have been employed by perpetrators of such fraud to cover their steps.
A fraud claim for which criteria of content are insufficient to directly unambiguously identify the fraud-perpetrating associate(s), may pose a challenge for entity internal investigation. Inefficiencies of stymied investigations may contribute to ongoing damage of the financial standing and reputation of customers and entities.
It would, therefore, be desirable for financial services entities to have means for efficiently identifying likely fraud-perpetrating associates. Likewise, expeditious means for assessing (“scoring”) the risk posed by each such likely perpetrator would be desirable.